The Captain's Daughter

by Peter David

  "Excellent," he said.

  Lord, he really did believe in tempting fate. Not willing to send Sulu off to disaster all by himself, Rand stood. "Permission to accompany you, sir," she said.

  "I appreciate the offer, Commander, but no." He rose from his chair. "This is my responsibility. My decision. And my business. No one else is going to take a risk as a result of it except me."

  She nodded, but she didn't look happy about it. Not unsympathetically, Sulu put a hand on her shoulder and said, "I appreciate the thought, Janice. Hold the fort. I'll be back before you know it."

  "Will do, sir," she said gamely … wondering if she was ever going to see him again.

  Sulu, meantime, turned to Anik. And in a low voice he said, "If I were Starfleet, I'd be sending another ship out to spank us. Keep sensors on maximum, and don't hesitate for a moment to back off. Leave me if necessary."

  "Captain, we wouldn't …"

  "You would and you should, if it means the alternative is standing your ground and fighting another starship. You have your orders, Anik. I expect you to carry them out."

  "Yes, sir," said Anik, not looking especially happy about it.

  He headed for the turbolift, and behind him various crew members echoed each other as they said, "Good luck." He stopped and nodded to them in response.

  "Good luck to us all," he said. "I have no doubt we'll all need it."

  He stopped at the armory, not wanting to take any chances. By the time he got to the shuttlecraft, Anik was waiting for him.

  They stood facing each other, Sulu's arms draped behind his back. "Here to wish me bon voyage, Commander?"

  "Sir … I am asking you one more time not to do this."

  "And why are you asking me this, when you know I have already made up my mind?"

  Anik looked somewhat self-conscious. "Because I'm being selfish, sir."

  He raised an eyebrow. "Selfish?"

  "Yes. Because when I was coming up through the Academy, the exploits of Captain Kirk and his command crew were already … there's no other way to put it, sir … legendary. And my greatest hope, my goal, was to be able to serve under one of those remarkable people. You people were … are … my heroes. So when your previous number one, Commander Valtane, requested transfer off the Excelsior …"

  "Valtane was a good officer," admitted Sulu, "but the crew never warmed to him."

  "Yes, well … his loss was my gain. You have no idea, Captain, how many strings I pulled, favors I called in … how hard I lobbied for this assignment. And I achieved my goal. I am living my dream. I try not to make a point of it because, frankly"—she shifted uncomfortably—"I don't consider it a terribly professional attitude to have. But there it is, and it's mine."

  "So what you're saying is that you feel I'm taking a needless risk and, therefore, jeopardizing your dream."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Doesn't that seem a bit self-centered to you?"

  "Yes, sir," she said again, not sounding the least bit repentant.

  "Well, Commander … I guess you'll find that just because one rises to the rank of captain, that doesn't necessarily mean that one becomes any less self-centered." He paused. "I remember an incident with Captain Kirk, about ten years ago … he was Admiral Kirk at the time. We'd been caught completely flat-footed by Khan … you might have heard about it."

  "I was in my last year at the Academy. The students who came back, who … survived … called it the training mission from hell."

  "That's fairly accurate. In any event, we were helpless, taken off guard by the Reliant. Power out, weapons down. Not a hope in the world. And we got a subspace transmission from the Reliant … and I'll never forget this, as long as I live. Uhura turned to the admiral and said we were receiving terms of surrender. It was as if she'd spoken the foulest obscenity. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. When the admiral told her to put it on-screen, it was as if we'd all been stabbed because this was James T. Kirk, and he didn't surrender while he was alive. And he wound up stalling for time and outsmarting Khan. He'd done it. Even though he blamed himself, called himself 'senile,' nevertheless … he sent the Reliant running. It was as if all was right with the galaxy once more. So I suppose … I learned that from him. To never surrender until the last card is played. And even though Demora is out of the game, I still have a few hands I'm going to play out. Do you understand?"

  Anik sighed. "Not really, I guess, since I still would prefer you didn't have to go."

  "I'd prefer it too." He headed toward the shuttle, then turned and said, "Anik. I should remind you that an attractive young yeoman served with Captain Kirk in his first five-year mission. One Janice Rand by name. She wasn't with him quite as long as I was, but … I suppose it could have been considered quality time. So if it's the spirit of us 'legends' that so motivated you, well … you'll find that there's legends everywhere you look. They are what we make of them."

  She nodded and stepped back as Sulu climbed into the shuttlecraft Galileo. "Good luck, Captain. We'll be waiting for you."

  "Keep a light burning," he replied as the door sealed him in. Moments later, the shuttlecraft lifted out of the bay and angled around and down toward the surface of Askalon V.

  She heard the voices, and they sounded concerned.

  They reached her as if from a great distance, and she sensed that, this time, they weren't directed at her. They were talking with each other, although she felt as if they were slowly moving toward her like the sun's rays creeping over the horizon. . . .

  "They're in orbit. What are they doing here?"

  "What do you think they're doing here?"

  "He knows."

  "He couldn't know!"

  "He does, somehow he does."

  "I say we take him. I owe him."

  "Don't be an idiot. We have the girl. That was risk enough. He's a damned starship captain. There will be questions. . . ."

  "Let there be questions. There's always questions. What there won't be is answers. I want him."

  "No."

  "I said …"

  "I said no! We've indulged it this far! Any more would be suicide! I said … no!"

  None of the conversation meant anything to her. It all blended together, one voice with another. All of it having a blur of incoherency to it.

  But still …

  But still …

  Vague bits of comprehension began to creep back to her.

  Self-awareness. Understanding. Slowly she became aware that she was more than just a mind floating in a pool of nothingness. She had a name. She had a being. She had a purpose.

  She had to get out. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-six

  THE SHUTTLECRAFT skimmed the surface of Askalon V. The ions in the atmosphere caused the vessel to buck under Sulu's hand, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle.

  He had studied Harriman's reports on the event thoroughly, and was able to pilot the shuttle to the exact coordinates where the final, fatal encounter with Demora took place a week ago.

  What he was pleased to see was that the surface of the planet was apparently going to cooperate in his investigations. Because of its thick, claylike texture, all the prints had remained exactly—or close to exactly—the way that they had been. He nosed the shuttle downward to within ten meters of the surface, then brought a tight view of the area up on the screen so that he could inspect the prints. Sure enough, there they were. Clear signs of a scuffle, with dirt kicked up, tossed around. He could see the remains of the distress beacon, which had been quite thoroughly smashed during the scuffle. Close up, he could even make out blood on the dirt, although he didn't like to think about whose it might be. It certainly backed up what Harriman had put in his report; it had been a vicious fight. The fact that Demora had been bare-handed … indeed, bare naked … had done nothing to lessen the ferocity of the encounter.

  Naked and … barefoot.

  He zoomed in the exterior monitors on the shuttlecraft, looking for signs of unclad feet. It took him a few m
oments to pin it down, but there it was. Footprints left behind by Demora's bare feet. He brought the shuttlecraft to a slightly higher elevation, so that he was now about twenty meters high.

  There. There to the west, he saw the footprints leading off. He eased the shuttlecraft in the direction that the prints had come from in order to track them to their point of origin.

  It took a few moments for him to backtrack, although not too long. Certainly a shuttle could cover distance much more rapidly than a woman on foot. Even if she was running, which Sulu could now tell that she had been doing. At least that's what she'd been doing at first, because her footprints weren't flat. Rather they were weight-distributed in such a way that clearly only the balls of her feet were making an impression. Not only that, but they were farther apart, the wider gait of someone taking long, loping strides.

  He thought briefly of all the times they'd gone running together. What a nightmarish contrast this sordid world was to the times they had jogged side by side through San Francisco's sloping streets.

  Then he noticed something else. He saw booted footprints coming in from the side and roughly paralleling the running prints of Demora. But the booted prints were going in the other direction.

  From the size of the booted prints, Sulu suspected that they likewise belonged to Demora. And the angle that they came from would be consistent with the landing party's original arrival. In other words, Demora had come from the general area of the northwest, moved in this general direction … and then something had happened, reducing her to naked savagery, and she'd come hightailing it in a straight easterly direction until running into, and attacking, Harriman and his people.

  So all Sulu had to do was get to the point where the encounter had been … find what happened there … and then he would have the answer.

  Or at the very least, he'd have even more questions.

  The shuttle continued its course. In the distance, Sulu spotted the ruined city that had been mentioned in Harriman's reports. What had the inhabitants been like, he wondered. Had some outlandish virus swept over them, turning them all into mindless berserkers such as what Demora had become? Had they been reduced to predator and prey, tearing each other apart until there was nothing left?

  And what had happened to Demora, then, was some sort of residual disease left floating in the air?

  But if that were the case, why hadn't Harriman and the others been affected? Why just Demora?

  Why her?

  Why her? Well … that was the question, wasn't it. That's what this was all about. Sulu had to admit that this was more than just an exploratory probe to find out what had happened. He was looking for some sort of cosmic answer. Something that would explain to him precisely why his little girl had been singled out to be overtaken by, and fall prey to, this awful demise.

  In short … he wanted the universe to make sense.

  He had traveled the stars for so long that he had almost begun to believe that he could see the barest meaning behind it all. Sometimes he thought that right there, just beyond human consciousness … there were the answers that every creature sought in order to understand. To seek knowledge. To boldly go, and all that. Just past the horizon line of understanding, he thought he could glimpse the start of comprehension.

  And then Kirk had been snatched away … and then Demora had been taken from him … and just like that, the two great constants of his life had evaporated.

  Nature abhors a vacuum.

  The loss of Kirk, and now Demora, had left a great airless, souless void within him, and he was trying to fill it up again. Fill it with answers … with cognizance … with something, dammit. Anything.

  The footprints stopped.

  Sulu brought the shuttlecraft to a slow halt, hovering above the area that now seemed to serve as the origin point of the tracks.

  At first glance, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this stretch of land. It was slightly hillier than other places, but the terrain was that same claylike texture. No shrubbery or brush, flora or fauna.

  What there was was the beginning of the barefoot tracks … and the end of the booted tracks. Apparently Demora had gotten to this geographic point … removed her clothes … run back in the general direction of the landing party and tried to kill them. Right where they met, the dirt was a bit disturbed, although nothing too disorderly. As if there had been a very brief scuffle there.

  There were no other prints around, which seemed to undercut the notion that some animal had bitten her, giving her an unknown and fast acting version of rabies. Still, it could have been airborne. How many diseases had been transmitted by insects, after all?

  There was …

  "Wait a minute," said Sulu.

  Tracks, to and from. No other tracks around. No brush. No place to hide. His view in all directions was unobstructed.

  "Where are her clothes?" he asked himself. "Where the hell are her clothes?"

  The dirt around where the footprints intersected was in disarray, but it didn't seem dug up. So apparently she hadn't buried her clothes. She could have phasered them into nonexistence … but then where was the phaser? Could have set the phaser to self-destruct … but someone in the landing party would certainly have heard the blast, plus there would be some sort of scorch marks somewhere.

  He used shipboard sensors to scan the area where the footprints came together. The atmosphere precluded reliable sensor scans from orbit, but here the readings were a bit clearer. Not much, though.

  Sulu chewed on his lower lip for a moment, and then angled the shuttlecraft downward. He landed the Galileo not right on the spot where he was suspicious, but instead fifty meters away.

  He sat in the shuttle for a long moment, his mind working, trying to anticipate. Then he leaned forward and began to program a course for the shuttlecraft to follow. He set distance, speed, angle. And then he said, "Computer."

  "Working," replied the calm female voice.

  He gave instructions in quick, clear sentences. The computer acknowledged the instructions in its inflectionless tone. The thing he liked about dealing with a computer was that it didn't bother to point out to him that the orders he was giving seemed, on the surface, crazy bordering on suicidal. There was no deep philosophical discussion. It was just a matter of, "Do this," to which the computer would respond, "Okay."

  Sulu was all for spirited arguments, but every so often it was nice to have things go simply.

  He ran an atmosphere check as a precaution and found nothing unusual. Nevertheless, just to play it safe, he placed a filtration mask over the lower half of his face. He took a deep breath to make sure that the mask was functioning as it was supposed to. Then he slipped on his field jacket to protect against the chill, opened up the shuttlecraft, and stepped out onto the terrain.

  His feet sank a bit into it, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. His phaser was strapped to his belt, and he was holding his tricorder as he studied the readouts.

  The filtration mask went a long way toward alleviating the breathing problems that the landing party from the Enterprise had experienced. Nonetheless, the deceptively chilled wind that flittered across the planet's surface was certainly nasty enough to give him pause, even though he was wearing his field jacket. He stretched to work kinks out of his muscles as he felt his joints freezing up. Getting old, he thought.

  Slowly, carefully, he walked over to the area where Demora had undergone her startling transformation. He circled it, frowning. There was something, according to the tricorder … something beneath the ground. He couldn't quite make it out, however. He was still getting interference with the tricorders scanning circuitry. But was it possible that it was still the atmosphere …?

  No. No, he began to suspect the exact opposite. He walked the perimeter, clutching the tricorder as if it were a life preserver, or even the Holy Grail. Something was … was generating interference. Was mucking with the tricorder's ability to fully apprise him of the area.

  He stepped close
r to the footprints and where they intersected, taking care not to tread directly on them. He didn't want to obliterate them in case he needed to—

  And the ground went out from under him.

  He'd had no warning at all, except for the slightest grinding of motors from somewhere he couldn't pinpoint. The ground beneath him opened up quickly and he felt something tugging at his legs. Immediately he realized what it was: a rushing of air like a vacuum, as if he were being sucked down into some great black tube. In the brief time that he had to register an impression, all he could make out was blackness.

  All that happened in just under a second and then Sulu disappeared. He cried out as he plummeted into the darkness, but the sounds of his shout were cut off as the ground closed up over him.

  Not that there would have been anyone to hear him anyway.

  He fell out of control, Alice down the rabbit hole.

  Alice … the rabbit hole.

  The amusement park planet …

  Even as he fell, even as blackness surrounded him, his mind was racing as he realized …

  … the amusement park planet in the Omicron Delta region … where things had come up from underground … where beings and objects were instantly manufactured … beings like the White Rabbit … and Alice … and the black knight, and that revolver with a seemingly infinite supply of bullets … and the samurai … and.

  Demora …

  The name whispered in his mind, and then he slammed to a halt as unconsciousness claimed him.

  * * *

  It was very still on the bridge of the Excelsior. Anik sat in the command chair, watching the screen steadily. The planet, its secrets still carefully maintained, sat on the screen as the starship orbited it.

  The bridge crew went about their duties in a hushed, almost apprehensive manner. There was the usual hum from the instrumentation, the quiet chatter among the crew. But overall there was an air of restraint. Part of their attention was on their work, but most of their minds was on the surface with Captain Sulu.